Neave's Sketchbook

[MeteorCat]

Yay Page 7!
Environments. Wow I'm so bad at this. I haven't done these studies in quite a while. I spent less time on each piece as I continued, starting from slowest.
The mountains seem best and somehow I spent the least time on them. They don't look so bad at about 500x400px

[Zauselbart]

i also have problems with landscapes!
so i'm not the best person for advice
my advice for you is to use in the beginning of the sketch a larger brush
and keep it simpel and nice

[Revidescent]

On the landscapes - maybe try some studies like these tiny ones? You're still getting caught up in detail and missing the big shapes. Definitely making progress though, keep at it! =D

[MeteorCat]

Zauselbart - thanks for stopping by.

Revidescent - I did as you said. Still awful but thanks anyway. Maybe the images should be smaller next time?


Sketch dump. Character Model sheet for animation class. Thumbnail style environment studies (by Rev's recommendation).

[Revidescent]

Even smaller might help, but honestly I think the enviro studies are good, and a definite step in the right direction. They feel a lot more solid and they're reading a lot better than your previous ones. Maybe instead of (or in addition to) going smaller, try a few entirely with brushes at 100% opacity and 100% (or 80-90%) flow? Push that solidity. Once you've got a handle on breaking things down into big shapes, then you can work on texture and detail. (This is something I'm currently struggling with myself, TBH, this stuff can be a pain to simplify.)

[MeteorCat]

Thanks for the great tip Revidescent. It definitely worked! I only added a bit of textures at the end.

[toxkillfraex]

Your environments could use more contrast in light. (if using photoshop higher or lower the brightness of the color you're using)
A good way to check your lighting (if your having trouble to check it in color) is to add a black layer set to hue or color (in photoshop... I unno any other programs well though, but I'm guessing you could apply it as well in fairly similar was)

The blueish gray mountains in your last post is even darker on the tops of the mountain than the bottom which... frankly doesn't make sense to m eye =/

If your having trouble with values try making black and white paintings first before moving on to color.

Hope I helped! Good luck with practice =3

[MeteorCat]

Kitty study. Trying to only use the hard brush. So far so good.

[MeteorCat]

Progress. Still using the hard brush oh yeah!

[tj0ri]

sweet stuff i love the fox and his expressions keep it up

[MeteorCat]

Thank you Tj0ri.

Sketch dump and a new oil painting.

[Kassary]

It's always so inspirational to see people practice as hard as you.
As for the digital work I always feel like there is a little sharpness / detail missing or some sort of focal point. I'm not sure whether you do that because they're just studies but I thought I'd just throw that in.

[MeteorCat]

Thanks Kassary. I try to keep things loose as its my style but I should probably try rendering things out a bit too.

Quick & crappy environment

[Kerah]

Using a hard brush is hard, eh?
But it'll pay off, promise!

Lots of hatzlaha buddy

[kingkostas]

Hello mate, its great to see such dedication. Actually thats the most important thing right now. You have to keep up the studies and have fun.Be more careful with the black when you approach colors, but mostly focus on greyscale rendering imho.When a piece doesnt work its mostly due to problematic values. But anyway since i see that you keep up thats a matter of time. Lets both keep up then !!!

[Rhubix]

I havn't been by in a while, glad to see you're keeping busy

I really like the life drawings in 184, there's only a few of them but you can really tell that you were looking at a real person when you did them.
The little red panda is quite cute as well, but I wouldn't want to animate something with that much chaotic fur - I think I would go cross eyed lol.

Keep it up! Happy sketching

[Forrest_I]

Hey thanks for commenting in my sketchbook

Your looking good, you should try to work more on your edges though. A lot of your studies are very blurred and there aren't really any sharp lines anywhere, and I know your style is rough and quick but that doesn't necessarily mean your studies have to be. Take your time with your studies, learn what you need to learn from it, if you rush through it super quick and just call it done after a little bit you aren't really learning. Anyway, keep up the dedication and the studies, it'll help you a lot

[MeteorCat]

Kerah - Thanks mate. Yes, the hard brush is paying off slowly.

kingkostas - Thank you for visiting. I will take your advice and attempt some greyscale environment studies soon.

Rhubix - Good to see you agian Rhubix. Thanks for the kind words. Yeah, I love red pandas, nice of you to notice that its not a fox. We won't have to animate it we're just practicing on doing model sheets.

Forrest_I - Thank you for coming to visit too! A lot of people have talked about my edges but I'm not really sure what to do. Any ideas? I agree about taking time with studies. Sometimes you want to do as many as possible in a certain amount of time. I will try and remember to slow down and take my time.


TV paint sketches in class.

[MeteorCat]

Fin is too short a message to post on these forums

This environment began with the hard brush and towards the end I smoothed out the places I thought required attention by turning the opacity and flow pen pressure on.
Will do some greyscale ones later!

[MeteorCat]

I feel like I'm spamming. My apologies.
Imagination greyscale atmosphere thingies. Would love some feedback on these two.

[MeteorCat]

Reference + grey-scale + hard brush + about 20 minutes = not so bad

[kevin_]

very nice updates! glad to see you are still at it! keep it up!

[MeteorCat]

Thanks for the support kevin_.

I have no idea what I sketch sometimes.

[PNate]

Hey meteorcat, hope you dont mind but I did a couple super quick paintovers for post#200 since you said you were open to some feedback

For the first piece I think the edges could be defined better so I made the foreground mountain sharper and lost some of the detail for the farther one. I'm assuming it's a really cloudy day because the distant mountain is very light and kind of wispy so I added in some extra cloudiness for atmospheric perspective. I dont know if thats what you were going for but the values are very bright for the far mountain so it looks most likely like that or a very hyper bright sun highlight (in which case, that much of the mountain wouldn't be that bright). It also looked a little flat so I darkened out a middle ground with the mountain on the right.

For the second one, I wasn't really sure what type of lighting situation this was. I'm guessing it's sort of a cloudy type day but with sunshine poking through and lighting the horse and building. I defined a horizon line because right now it looks like it's night time with a very very dark ocean and sky in the back (which wouldnt work with this type of light). I moved the entrance to the building to the right, because right now it's compositionally a little odd since its almost at the center of the image and also it practically wouldnt make sense for the knight to have to climb around the edge of the cliff to get in. Also, the size of the entrance is almost the size of the knight, so I made it smaller to push the perspective. I shrank the castle to perspective some more and added some extra light bouncing off the castle. I would say to be careful of using bright values in your work because you want to save those for the highlights and they'll generally make things look unrealistic. Check out this tutorial if you haven't already: http://conceptart.org/forums/showthr...t-BIG-download! I learned a lot from that.

I have no idea if I was on the right track for what you were aiming for so apologies if I got it wrong! Feel free to ignore any of this because I don't really know what I'm talking about

[Freshfool]

Hey man good effort ur improving i see in your environments i think you should try practiceing some more anatomy though for your figures like some loomis or bridgemen and do some quick sketches of people from life or pictures youll improve even more keep it up!

[Revidescent]

Good progress on the brushwork. Your stuff is definitely starting to look more solid, though you're still lacking a clear division of forms in places, as pointed out by PNate's great paintovers. Really like that lion study; the muzzle seems a bit off-axis, but the fur is really nice. =)

[Rhubix]

Hiya Meteor, I think it might help your painting if you practiced doing some very simple forms so you could really focus on a value exercise. When you're trying to do a whole landscape there's a tonne to think about, proportion, perspective, lighting, colour, composition. I've always found it easier to break the work up in to a bunch of smaller exercises, meant to give the ol' brain one task to really focus on. Then when I get back to doing bigger pieces, all those little bits start coming together.
You can never go wrong with just a sphere a cylinder and a cube

Happy sketching & happy new year!

[MeteorCat]

freshfool - Yes I love drawing from life I'm just not so great at drawing really fast with the noise and outside distractions. I'm kind of sick of doing "book anatomy studies" - instead I'm drawing lots of figures and gestures but I should probably re-do some Bridgeman and Loomis stuff. Thanks!

Rev - thanks for the comments and tips I tried making that lion study with almost only the hard round regular ps brush.

Rhubix - I've been doing lots of still lives lately so know that your words influence me! Thanks for the kind visit.

Quite a big update: oils, animation studies, still life (lives in plural?), random class (life) sketching, etc'.

I've been quite busy with work and I have a bit of big news. I have just signed up for another major or however you would call it so I'm going to have like 3-5 more courses from the beginning of March. It's Game design, based on the VFS curriculum but spanned over 3 years a.k.a. 6 semesters. I'm very excited and I hope that when I finish all these courses I'll really have the basic skill sets to begin my journey as an artist of some kind. Not really sure if its going to be an illustrator, animator, graphic designer or game developer/designer. I'm hoping to utilise all the knowledge from each somehow similar and sometimes very different profession.

[MeteorCat]

I've decided to do a large nude digital painting to tackle some weaknesses of mine. Mainly how to paint digitally without colour picking. It's so freakin' hard! At least the proportions are right so far.

REF - courtesy of Marcus Ranum - www.ranum.com

[MeteorCat]

30 minute sea study. I quite like this. Maybe I'll keep working on it later as it's not really finished